Lean Blog Audio: Practical Lean Thinking, Psychological Safety, and Continuous Improvement

The "five" in the "five whys" methodology is not a magic number, be it Lean or Lean Startup approaches.

http://leanblog.org/audio107

Why do we need to move beyond "The Five Whys" into a more robust problem solving model for Lean or Lean Startup settings?

http://leanblog.org/audio106

In discussing Lean and working with people in different organizations, I so very often hear things like "we don't build cars" or "we're different." I know I'm not the only one who hears that. The implication is "Lean won't work here, because we're different" in some way. Different country, different industry, different hospital department, different patient or payer mix, etc.

Lean healthcare really is a global movement. Last year, when I went to Japan, we had people in the group from all across Asia, Denmark, Canada, the U.S., and Saudi Arabia. Health systems all around the world need to improve quality and patient safety, reduce waste and create better work environments, reduce waiting times, and get costs under control. These are universal challenges.Thankfully, Lean is helping.

Here's a story from Malaysia that caught my eye: "How assembly lines inspired Asia's hospitals."

http://leanblog.org/audio103

Through our practice of Lean, we're looking at processes and our management system, looking to identify waste and opportunities for improvement.Lean is about engaging people to have them ask why we do things a certain way or if things could be better (it's not about finding fault from on high and telling them what to do).

The answer to why we (frontline staff or leaders) do something a certain way is often:

"We've always done it that way."

The fact we've always done something that way doesn't automatically mean it's a bad practice. But, we should be willing to challenge things to figure out if we should reinvent that process or tweak it. The same question applies to management practices.

http://leanblog.org/audio102

The world (especially the world wide web) is full of surveys. Tell us how we're doing! Your satisfaction is important to us! We see this so often, it's easy to become numb to it in our Yelp-ified world.It's definitely a "first world problem," but I've been shopping for a new car over the past few months and I finally bought something. I won't disclose what I bought, but it's replacing a 2004 Saab 9-3 that I've had for 11 years now.

The car shopping and buying experience has its frustrations - that's nothing new...

http://leanblog.org/audio101

I'm going to be attending the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco next month, as a "faculty member," a moderator for a session, TBD, and maybe serving as a mentor. The organizers asked me to write a post introducing myself to that audience.Eric Ries, author of the book The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, makes it very clear that the Lean Startup methodology has its roots in the Toyota Production System and Lean manufacturing. Ries writes about factory settings and gives credit to giants like Taiichi Ohno (listen to our podcast talking about this).

There are some in the Lean Startup circles who seem pretty unaware of the industrial roots of Lean. This often causes confusion.

Many of you don’t care about football, but you might find it interesting, as I did, to learn that Northwestern’s defensive coordinator Mike Hankwitz is apparently a fan of Kaizen...

http://leanblog.org/audio100

These Donald Trump hats (and hats for other candidates including Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush) are made by a Newark company, Unionwear. Lean is their strategy and their production system. That’s how they are competing against China.

http://leanblog.org/audio99

http://leanblog.org/audio98

There's a really good article that was published by Modern Healthcare as a special report, written by Sabriya Rice. Sabriya spent a week observing a rapid improvement event (RIE) at the Sts. Mary and Elizabeth Medical Center in Illinois. It's an in depth article that, I think, very accurately reflects the reality that Lean is helpful, but the process isn't easy for a number of reasons.